If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

This is question I had too. Don't really understand, but why would someone want to try to render their computer be unbootable, just to have open source version of thing, that probably works in the first place. Not like there is ANY forcable agreement upon user or anything like that. The only reason why would anyone want it - is original BIOS being so bad, that it affects performance/affects stability.

Read the blog posts, they explain the people who would be most interested in this, and why.

but there's more

Originally Posted by dimko

Sorry, a bit too sleepy... Cutting costs for producer is major factor i guess.

Nevermind the AWESOME stuff the OEMs can do with this awesome stuff. in bios hypervisors, lack of legacy code (like stuff that makes windows boot faster) in bios pacman or self updating bios (from a trusted source). imagine that instead of discovering a bios bug years later when some PSI card doesn't work or hanging at boot (thats an HP and a Sun example respectively) because theres no notification of this.

At first I was kind of worried by the many mentions of AGESA, but upon further inspection it looks like this is because they've actually done a drop of AGESA code into the coreboot tree, not because they're require you to get it through other channels. This might just turn out to actually be pretty cool. I'm even more tempted to grab a Zacate board now (it looks like the Asus ones have a socketed flash chip...).

The only issue that I really have with Coreboot is that most motherboards out there carry enough proprietary motherboard add ons that you end up usually loosing a lot of "special" functionality that those motherboards support (examples like, off south bridge sata connectors, wireless, thermal monitoring, fan speed control, etc). That last real manufacturer that made a lot of their motherboards close to reference designs was Abit. Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, etc fill their motherboards up with so much "non-reference" crap that you end up paying more then needed for features that are not supported with Coreboot.

The only issue that I really have with Coreboot is that most motherboards out there carry enough proprietary motherboard add ons that you end up usually loosing a lot of "special" functionality that those motherboards support (examples like, off south bridge sata connectors, wireless, thermal monitoring, fan speed control, etc). That last real manufacturer that made a lot of their motherboards close to reference designs was Abit. Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, etc fill their motherboards up with so much "non-reference" crap that you end up paying more then needed for features that are not supported with Coreboot.

Couldn't a kboot payload or similar handle a lot of that, though? I thought part of the point of "coreboot" as opposed to "LinuxBIOS" was to only integrate support for the "core" hardware needed to have a sane system to hand off to a payload (RAM initialized, CPU/MMU/etc. in a useful state, etc.).

I really don't understand he negative comments. I don't run any proprietary operating system. This means, in most cases, that I can't update a BIOS. Also, the same way I trust Open Source for my operating systems, I would happily embrace it for my hardware.

But I agree that risking bricking your mobo is a bit extreme, how do you bootstrap a dead mobo? This should really be an OEM install.